Today there are a wide set of terminals which includes means for viewing digital media. Examples of such terminals are wireless terminals, PCs, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), consoles, CD players, MP3 players etc. The digital media is typically stored locally in a local storage medium of the terminal, on a CD-ROM or downloaded to the terminal from a remote storage medium or any combination thereof. The amount of digital media files that are available for download to a terminal today is large and is increasing everyday and so is the download rate. Furthermore, it is foreseen that the available sizes of local storage mediums of handheld terminals in the future will allow for storage of a relatively large amount of digital media files in a single handheld terminal.
If the media file is to be downloaded to a terminal and played back, or played back directly from the local storage medium of a terminal, this is a rather straightforward procedure, for example using a media player such as Winamp, RealPlayer or a browser plugin. For instance, the audio file format MP3 includes the ID3v2 tagging system for identifying several different metadata types associated with an audio track comprised in an MP3 file. Examples of such metadata types are Title, Artist/Author, Album, Year, etc. A specific audio track is played back from the local storage medium of a terminal by searching for and selecting the audio track that has the title or artist, etc., of that audio track. To download a specific audio track from a remote site on the Internet, a proper URL is entered to the browser and the audio track is downloaded.
However, in the case where the desired digital media is not so specifically defined as the name of a specific digital media file or, in the MP3 case the actual title, artist, etc., prior art offers no solution to the problem of finding the desired media files amongst a large number of media files that are available for download or are stored in a local storage medium. This problem increases as the number of media files increases.